Mobile TV missing the goal

Paris -- The World Cup is revealing an inconvenient truth to the thousands of Italians and Germans trying to watch the games on their cell phones: The physical world is the enemy of mobile TV.

Can users watch a match on a handset LCD in bright sunlight? Almost impossible. Can they curl up in bed to enjoy a game in cellular solitude? It'd be tough: Most mobile-TV broadcast infrastructure is aimed at outdoor coverage.

Can users trust their handsets not to drop frames as the match-winning goal is scored? Not if they're relying on streaming video from a third-generation network. "If there are more than seven users per 3G cell, it's coming to a grinding halt," said Dominic Strowbridge, marketing director at U.K. carrier BT Movio.

Even when a match is beamed via Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) or DMB infrastructure, separate from a UMTS 3G network, geography profoundly affects quality-of-service. "It's not a uniform science," said Steve Turner, business development manager for mobile broadcast at Philips Semiconductors.

Nonetheless, this month's world soccer championships are shaping up as a defining moment for mobile TV. Debitel in Germany and Italy's 3 Italia are broadcasting all the games live, in their entirety, instead of just offering snippets. Thousands of Italian subscribers began watching last Friday on their DVB-H mobile phones. At the same time, German subscribers were watching in Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, using Terrestrial-Digital Multimedia Broadcast (T-DMB)-based handsets.

Elsewhere, some 3G network operators in Europe are streaming World Cup highlights, near-live replays of each goal or match results via cellular networks.

The World Cup '06 user experience will directly affect next-generation handset chip and system designs, further investment by network operators to enable indoor coverage and a possible hybrid broadcast/streaming infrastructure in the future.

The performance level is particularly important, said Yannick Levy, CEO of DiBcom, a French fabless semiconductor vendor specializing in digital mobile TV. "If your demodulator can provide performance improvement by 3 to 4 dB--which our chip does--it results in 50 to 60 percent savings for network operators, as they need to install fewer repeaters," he said.

The biggest difference between DVB-H and DAB-based T-DMB is the number of available channels. 3 Italia is currently offering nine mobile-TV channels, increasing to 14 by mid-July. Debitel has launched four TV channels, two "visual radio" channels (mainly music, with some graphics and text) and free access to DAB radio channels.